League Model

In official FLL competitions, teams attend a qualifing event. At that event, roughly 35% of the teams advance to the next round (area championship, state championship, and so on). For the remaining 65% of teams, their season ends after a single competition. These percentages vary from region to region of course.

With such a large percentage attending just a single competition, they do not have the opportunity to learn from their experience and the judge’s feedback, make improvements, and attend another competition. This is a missed learning opportunity for the students.

FTC has a league model and FRC has a district model, where teams have the opportunity to compete in more than one event. The results from two events are combined to determine the league/district rankings, and those are used to determine the teams that advance.

The FLL league model supported by FLL Scorer is inspired by the FTC and FRC systems. It provides teams a second chance to complete, enabling that extra learning opportunity of improving their project and robot based on feedback at an event.

The league model may not work at a large scale. Imagine the number of official qualifiers in your region, the number of venues required, the number of event days, the number of volunteers, and so on…then double that! However, it is quite doable at a smaller scale, such as in a series of “unoffical events” (that would be officially classified as scrimmages).

If all of the events are scored with the same scoring computer, as a set of events within the system, the league model portion of the system gathers the scores from the first two events a team attends, assigns a composite score to each event, then sums them for the team’s league score. The Standings page shows those scores (both the individual event scores and the sum of the two event scores), along with a ranking of teams based on the sumed score.

Note

It is probably best to not display the league standings during an event. It changes too dramatically (especially if judges are entering rubrics as part of judging; some teams will have full judging rubrics while others have nothing) and is more likely to induce added stress during the event.

If there are enough teams that participate in a league system like this, the standings could be used to invite some number of the top teams in the league to attend a league championship event (again, akin to the league championship event in FTC or the distrct championship event in FRC). Or, the league rankings can be used just for fun. It is entirely up to the organizers how far they want to go with the league model, and how much of their time they want to put into it.

When using the league model, the team’s rubrics must be captured in the Rubrics panel of the Admin page. This does not mean that the judges must use FLL Scorer to perform their judging, just that the results need to be entered by someone. The composite score is based on the robot game results, the project judging rubric, the robot design judging rubric, and the Core Values judging rubric (combined with the Core Values scores awarded by referees at each match). In other words, it is akin to the Champions Award criteria.

Note

The team’s composite score from an event is not necessarily computed in the same manner as OJS, Event Hub, and so on. It is possible that the rankings computed here are not in 100% agreement with the official rankings. Given that the rankings of the individual judging areas are used by not shown to teams, just like the judging rankings are not shared with teams, it is unlikely to be noticed.

In the unlikely case that a team is disqualified at an event, the only way to reflect that here is to change their judging rubrics to all 1’s. Either for all rubrics, or only one of them (if they were disqualified from only one judging area). This places them into “last place” in those judging areas, awarding them the least number of composite points.

Displaying the Standings page at the end of an event, after awards have been announced, could be fun for the teams. Or, the final results can be shared with all the teams at the conclusion of all of the league events. If or how this is utilized is up to your discretion and creativity!